Kyle Robot Animation using built-in animation not working

News & General Discussion
1

I assumed this would be insanely easy, but it’s turning out to be quite a pain.

What I have done successfully in 3D:

  • Insert a Cube
  • Create an animation clip and animation control for said Cube
  • Add keyframes with different rotations for the Cube
  • Run the animation
    Yaaay. Works perfectly.

Now, on to Robot Kyle…

I drag his Prefab (from Unity Technologies–> SpaceRobotKyle–>Prefabs) into the scene.
I created a custom animation controller and changed out the one on the top level game object (named RobotKyle) - CustomKyleAnimator is what I named it.

The included animations (.fbx files that came with him) can be dragged into the Animator, a transition created and they work. Great.

Here’s the problem
I want to create a simple animation just to play around with the capabilities. I click the top level RobotKyle game object (prefab) in the scene, and selected the Record button. Any time I clicked any of the body parts (under Geometry–> KyleRobot–>ROOT) it stops the Recording immediately.

So I looked and I see two Animator Components. One is on the top level RobotKyle and one is on this Geometry–>KyleRobot (prefab?). So, the one on KyleRobot appears to be preventing me from recording, so I tried removing it on the KyleRobot, leaving the one on RobotKyle.

When I hit Record now, none of the body part Transform cells are highlighted in Red, even though it’s allegedly recording. So it’s not detecting anything.

So I though, maybe I’m supposed to be animating the body parts under Skeleton. Nope. Those just seem to be random invisible game objects that don’t even properly line up with the actual rigging of Kyle.

Has anyone had any success animating Robot Kyle with a custom Animation within Unity?

I’m not really looking for “Use Blender” or “Use Mixamo” as solutions at this time. I want to try to understand what’s going on and why this is such a headache, when this shouldn’t be such a complex model!

Thanks a ton!

J

2

That’s odd, I don’t have the RobotKyle character but the changes you made sound like they should have worked (should just require a single root animation controller). Maybe avoid the prefab and just add the KyleRobot.fbx to the scene. Then add an animation controller to the root object and try again like the cube test. One thing to watch out for is that you can’t directly edit an existing fbx animation clip as it’s read only (need to duplicate it to edit it). But it sounds like you created a new clip which should be fine.

3

Thanks for the suggestion.

I just tried it with “Chinese Cyborg Warrior” and it does the exact same thing.

When I hit record on RobotKyle or this new model, they immediately hunch up from the regular T-shape or standing shape:

image
image1428×536 135 KB

They both do something similar.

And then as I’m changing rotation for the Upper Left arm / Left Arm (for RobotKyle) or LeftArm + LeftForeArm for the Cyborg Warrior, it visually looks like I’m moving them.

But when I go to a different point on the timeline, it resets anything I did to it on the previous keyframe. So the keyframe is there, but nothing I’ve done seems to be actually sticking.

Thanks,

J

4

I’m still curious why Kyle gets “hunched up” when you select record, but I’ve figured out the other problem.

In order to have the freedom to record rotations and most everything else, I had to change his model → Rig tab → CHANGE Humanoid to Generic.

Now I’m able to make it do what I need, so far.

Thanks,

J

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